In the Company of Dogs

By the time I was five, I had Lois’ genetic makeup memorized for anyone on our curling Coldwater Canyon street who asked, and someone always did. “She’s half basset, half terrier,” I would announce proudly, like a tourist reciting the greeting in the language of the country they are visiting. Indeed, Lois was a mutt with a long torso, stump-like legs, mottled wiry hair, and a tail that coiled like Spiral Jetty. She was my confidant and cohort. Lois was Ethel to my Lucy.

Growing up, I hit the sweet spot between younger sister and only child. I have two half-siblings, twelve and fourteen years my senior, with whom I am very close, but who always lived on a different continent and whom I saw at most three times a year. In essence, I grew up an only child. But I had Lois.

A dog becomes especially important to a child growing up without siblings close to her in age. Lois was my partner in crime. We went on adventures exploring the murky netherworld of cobwebs and extension cords behind the sets of Warner Bros. soundstages, both of us emerging clad in a coat of dust. We discovered treasures at the feet of the Eucalyptus trees below my house. Sometimes Lois led the way, like on expeditions down my grandmother’s ivy-cloaked hillside; other times I was in charge, like when I would bury her in the sand during a day at the beach in Malibu and she would lie there patiently for hours enjoying the coolness of the wet sand on her back.

Lois was a patient older sister, stoic while I used face paint to draw emerald studs on her petal-shaped ears and black Groucho Marx brows above her baleful eyes. And she was the gleeful younger brother, blindly following his wiser sibling on her adventures, like the time I decided to traverse the freshly painted wooden deck to my playhouse, and my mother, to her horror, discovered two sets of prints diagonally crossing the deck—one small pair of seven-year-old feet and, right behind it, the four-leaf clover of a paw print.

For the year my father was sick, Lois’s attention shifted. A distracted nine-year-old, I didn’t recognize it at the time, but I know now that while Lois remained devoted to me, her primary allegiance changed as she offered her companionship where it was needed most.

She still trotted happily to the patio gate to greet me when I came home from school, and she joined me in the kitchen while I ate dinner, watching attentively from her wicker basket in the corner. But she spent the majority of the day in the sage-green damask-print roll-arm chair in the master bedroom, the one she’d appropriated as her own the year we moved into our house. She held court from that chair, sleeping, surveying, engaging, facing the bed and whoever was in it. For most of 1995, that was my father. Because he was bed-ridden, Lois would be chair-ridden by choice, in solidarity. And she was fierce about it.

When Lois died, seven years later, my mother, my uncle, and I paid her the same respect. I remember lying next to her on the cool brick of our patio stroking her stomach as she breathed heavily. I will always be grateful for my constant childhood companion. But my great respect for her comes from her ability to know where her presence was needed. For her it was only natural. That’s what family does.